Woman goes under the knife to evade debt
She used borrowed bank cards to finance her surgery.
A 59-year old woman from the central Chinese city of Wuhan transformed her appearance through plastic surgery in order to avoid $3.71 million of personal debts, Xinhua said.
In a case highlighting the challenges facing China as it tries to establish a “credit society”, police were “astonished” after apprehending the woman, who fled to the southeastern Chinese city of Shenzhen after a court in Wuhan ordered her to pay off her debt. “We were surprised at the scene,” Xinhua news agency quoted a policeman as saying. “She looked in her 30s and was different from the photos we had.”
The woman, identified as Zhu Najuan, also confessed to using other people’s identity cards to travel across the country by train. She financed her plastic surgery using borrowed bank cards.
Representatives from more than 300 Chinese cities released a declaration earlier in July promising to make more credit available for consumer spending, part of the country’s efforts to find new sources of economic growth and reduce dependence on heavy industry and state-driven infrastructure investment. But as the country strives to make more credit available to individuals, it is also facing a surge in household debt.
As regulators try to establish a reliable nationwide credit rating system, authorities are exploring ways to crack down on people who do not pay their debts. A court in Jiangsu province has drawn up a blacklist of defaulters. Anyone who calls an individual on the blacklist will be forced to listen to a pre-recorded message saying “please urge this person to fulfil their legal obligations”.